‘The test that we do aboard the dhow is a presumptive test so we need that laboratory report to say whether it’s truly narcotics or not. We need that certification because one of the things that NCIS will do is create a law enforcement report that we hope can be used [as evidence] if it can be tied to an investigation on one of the networks.’
He treats each seizure as a criminal case, following all the stringent rules of evidence. ‘The young men and women who work very hard on the ships, they’re war fighters, but I’m a law enforcement officer, so a lot of what I’m here to do are fundamentals of law enforcement.’
He and other NCIS agents are trained in the physical demands of getting on and off the dhows at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Charleston, South Carolina. ‘What we’re doing this mission is very much what the coast guard does every day. The coast guard is not operating in this area of the world so that’s how NCIS … organically grew this ability, and in large part we did it going out with the Royal Australian Navy, so we’ve documented, photographed and captured a lot of this information. We hold onto it, we add to it and then that’s where our knowledge base comes from – getting out here and doing it and then we pass that on to the next agents.’
He admits that boarding the dhows is his least favourite part. ‘[It’s] definitely not the most fun part of the job. Anytime, interdiction operations are a lot of fun. However, whenever you add “at sea” to anything it becomes that much more dangerous and that’s why the skill of the Royal Australian Navy really comes in handy. They keep me safe and sound while doing the job.’
As for the condition of the dhows, he says, ‘Ah, they are a mess. They don’t handle very well in the sea and rats, colonies of roaches, really filthy.’
Despite the increasing flow of drugs down the smack track, Lerza does think his work is worthwhile. ‘I believe that the Royal Australian Navy hopefully with our assistance is making a difference. We’re definitely disrupting and that’s one of our main goals, because we know we’re not going to stop the flow of heroin or hash coming out of Pakistan, but we are hoping to disrupt and dismantle organisations. And I do believe we do that. We document everything, so we’re keeping track of what’s going on out here, the trends, how they’re smuggling [and how] they will change their techniques and tactics based on the fact that the Royal Australian Navy and the other navies are seizing this much of their product.’
Lerza attributes the terms ‘hash highway’ and ‘smack track’ to the Australian navy. ‘It’s credit where credit is due! The Royal Australian Navy came up with those terms.’
As for why the trade can’t be stamped out, ‘There’s always that lure of money’, he says. ‘If we can get the regional partners in Africa, in Pakistan, in Iran to deal with their own corruption, we feel that promotes regional stability … But when you have a large influx of cash in a very poor country that lure is great.’
None of the strategies aimed at stamping out the production of opium poppy crops in Afghanistan have worked.
‘Afghanistan has been referred to as the graveyard of empires,’ he reflects. ‘So again we have to look at some way of getting regional stability there. Maybe peace and education and hopefully not needing so much money will follow. I don’t believe the farmers are getting rich from this crop. I believe they’re being exploited just like the dhow crews are.’
He says Australia’s commitment to the vast problem is commendable. ‘We may want to say that it’s Afghanistan’s problem, its East Africa’s problem, it’s a southwest Asian problem. It’s not – it’s a global problem. Truly a global problem.’
While Agent Lerza sends his samples to the DEA in the US, other samples are taken back to the Australian Federal Police’s Forensic Drug Intelligence Unit. The Sydney-based unit provides intelligence support to investigations, expert policy advice to government and manages the Australian Illicit Drug Intelligence Program.
Team leader Dr Mark Tahtouh says they analyse all of the AFP’s illicit drug seizures, whether imported or seized inside Australia, as well as samples from state and territory police forces and those seized by the navy. They manage and house the central Forensic Drug Intelligence Database and liaise with the government’s National Measurement Institute (NMI) laboratories in Sydney, where the chemical analysis takes place.
‘The chemical profiling that we do … is based on similar programs in the US,’ he explains. ‘We also mirror some techniques used in Europe in some of the large forensic institutes.’
Speaking at the unit’s state-of-the-art laboratory complex on the outskirts of Canberra, Dr Tahtouh says there is no global narcotics database, but the agencies harmonise their methods and share information based on mutual understandings and methods of interpretation, including the margins of error. This is not as straightforward as it seems, he says. In comparing drug samples, it is always preferable to analyse them in the same laboratory on the same day at the same time.
‘You’re always going to have natural variations, even within the same laboratory on the same instrument, when analysing it on different days or with some time period in between,’ he says.
Tahtouh’s team members have experience in either forensic science, like himself, or law-enforcement intelligence.
‘I always like to say we try and teach the chemists a bit of intel and we try to teach the intel analysts a bit of chemistry,’ he says. ‘We find that middle ground to use the technical information that we derive from the analysis of the drugs to produce forensic intelligence.’
As well as the drugs’ chemical profile there is their ‘physical signature’ – how they are packaged and wrapped.
‘It’s particularly relevant for some of the seizures that the navy has made,’ he says. ‘There might be stamps and logos – those sorts of physical characteristics can be very useful to link different seizures together and to identify syndicates involved in their manufacture or transporting.’
They collect and collate all that information, monitor changes in manufacture practices and drug purity, link seizures and build a picture of the manufacture and trafficking networks. Each drug seizure must be treated as a crime scene and strict rules of evidence apply. Like Lerza and the navy, his unit does ‘presumptive’ testing before samples are sent to the NMI. ‘That gives us an idea of what drug we’re dealing with,’ Tahtouh says.
The NMI’s Australian Forensic Drug Laboratory conducts two types of analysis. First is the identification of the drug and its purity. The hand-held instruments used by the navy to identify drug samples cannot measure purity. They show only how similar the sample is to a reference spectrum of a known drug like heroin.
‘The Commonwealth legislation around drugs is actually based on the pure weight of drug present,’ Tahtouh explains. ‘So if someone imports ten kilograms of cocaine but it’s only fifty per cent pure then the [criminal] charges will be based on five kilos rather than the ten kilos. So the purity is very important for that purpose and there’s a certificate of analysis that’s issued around that.’
The heroin seized by the navy and analysed in Australia has been of relatively low purity, averaging less than fifty per cent.
The second set of tests conducted in the NMI lab is the chemical profiling for intelligence purposes.
‘It’s about working out where the drugs were made or how they’ve been manufactured,’ Tahtouh says.
Because heroin is derived from opium poppies and is therefore plant-based, chemical profiling can help determine where it came from and the only way to do that is by comparing a sample with ‘known-origin samples’.
How far it is possible to drill down into particular regions depends on the number and range of known samples. With heroin the range is quite limited. They can determine whether it comes from the Golden Triangle of southeast Asia or the Golden Crescent of southwest Asia but cannot yet identify specific cultivation spots inside Afghanistan.
However, a lot of work is being done to improve profiling techniques. The hop
e is that Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry may enable them to drill down further to the ‘isotopic ratio’ of drug samples, to help pin down the locations.
A big problem is gaining access to enough known-origin samples.
‘We have obtained samples from all around the areas but using the techniques that we have, [the samples] may be too similar to each other,’ Tahtouh says. ‘Afghanistan is not exactly the most quality-controlled environment. There are natural batch-to-batch variations even within the same facility. Sometimes we would say that within one region there’s more variability batch-to-batch than there is between one facility and another facility. That kind of throws everything out.’
Heroin from the Golden Crescent is mostly packed as loose powder in one-kilogram bags, such as those seized by the navy. Workers go around the poppy fields and score the unripened seed pods with a bladed tool. The opium gum oozes out, is scraped off and dried out to form opium resin, which contains a number of compounds.
The five main opiates – broadly, in order of quantity, morphine, codeine, thebaine, noscapine and papaverine – are present in various ratios that are also characteristic of where the poppy was grown, Tahtouh says. ‘By looking at those ratios we can tell differences between stuff grown in southeast Asia versus southwest Asia.’
Heroin manufacture is about refining the morphine. Once it is isolated, a compound called acetic anhydride is added to convert it to diacetylmorphine, a chemical name for heroin.
‘Acetic acid is vinegar; this is really like two vinegar molecules joined together,’ Tahtouh says. ‘We call it acetic anhydride but really, when you add it to the morphine, it’s a way to add vinegar or acetic acid to turn that morphine into diacetylmorphine or heroin, and that is the reason behind the vinegar smell to heroin.’
That forms ‘heroin base’ and the final step is to convert that to heroin hydrochloride using hydrochloric acid.
‘Heroin base is not very water soluble, therefore not very useful for injection,’ he says. ‘It has a lower melting temperature and therefore it’s more suitable for smoking whereas the hydrochloride is water soluble and therefore easier for injection. In Australia it’s almost exclusively that hydrochloric salt that we see.’
Once made, heroin can be adulterated. The analysts look out for adulterants and diluents that may be added in Afghanistan or along the supply chain, including caffeine, paracetamol, methorphan and some sugars. They also have some information about the movement of interim heroin products to different production facilities, some of which may specialise in particular stages of the process.
‘And there may be some processes occurring outside of Afghanistan itself, in that we do see a lot of trafficking of raw opium or morphine base or even heroin base out of Afghanistan,’ he says.
While Tahtouh is not aware of the Australian navy seizing interim products, there have been large seizures of raw opium beyond Afghanistan. ‘Logistically it doesn’t make a lot of sense because you have to ship a much larger amount of opium compared to if you refined it into heroin. That said, there is a market for opium itself. There are user groups, particularly in Iran, that smoke opium in its raw form.’
More recently, analysts are using profiling to link different samples. ‘Recent heroin seizures by the Royal Australian Navy have been profiled to be southwest Asian heroin.’
They also compare samples to other seizures. ‘Even though we can’t tell it’s from [a] particular production facility, we can at least say that this stuff that was seized by the navy at sea on this day has exactly the same chemical profile as this stuff that AFP seized a year ago or six months ago,’ he says. ‘Linking samples or seizures to each other is a very important part of the profiling, in addition to just telling you it’s from southwest Asia or southeast Asia. So even stuff that we seize in the next six months or so may be from the same batch or the same production facility [as that] interdicted by the navy.’
20
Chasing the Golden Crescent
During the three years to 2015, the Combined Maritime Forces seized 8300 kilograms of Afghan heroin. By the end of 2016, the figure had grown to more than nine tonnes with an approximate street value of $15 billion.
While it is the navy that seizes the drugs at sea, an important link in the intelligence chain is provided by Australian Federal Police liaison officers stationed in key locations throughout the Middle East.
Marzio da Re is a former AFP detective whose long police career included two major stints on the front line of narcotics smuggling from the Golden Crescent. At a coffee shop in suburban Perth the retired officer tells me that he was first posted to Pakistan in 1989 for three years as one of two Australian drugs liaison officers, and he returned to the capital Islamabad in 2010 for another posting that lasted nearly five years. In between, he spent twenty years in AFP jobs that included major drug interdictions, two police royal commissions (New South Wales and Western Australia), the investigation into the 2002 Bali bombings and a posting to Jakarta from 2007 to 2010 during the big influx of people-smuggling boats to Australia.
His first stint in Pakistan was spent almost exclusively on narcotics – heroin and cannabis resin in the Golden Crescent. At that time, as well as in Afghanistan, there was still significant cultivation of opium poppies happening in Pakistan, and the authorities took him out to see the opium fields. There were also many heroin processing laboratories – ‘plan labs’ – in the frontline province.
The heroin trafficked from the Golden Crescent was of an inferior quality, known as ‘brown sugar’, smoked by consumers in Europe. But Australian addicts preferred, and still do, to inject the purer white heroin from the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand.
‘Trafficking routes back then were pretty well known,’ he says. ‘And once again I don’t think there was just one singular route.’
The Makran coast (known as the ‘smugglers’ coast’) was quite a prominent route but not to the same extent as today, he says. ‘The dhows were still plying their trade to mainly Dubai. You were picking up small craft [mainly with hashish] back then. The dhows have been plying their trade with whatever commodity since time immemorial but we weren’t then seeing that [narcotics] trade down the east African coast.’
That trade route has now grown exponentially, as has the quality of the product. Then there are the newer manufactured drugs. ‘You’re now going to start seeing an ice epidemic or an ice amphetamine production problem coming out of Pakistan and Iran. You’re already seeing people being picked up and seizures being made, so we’re getting that capability, which is very disconcerting.’
The porous borders and tribal areas made it easy to set up labs and facilitate the movement of acetic anhydride, the precursor for heroin production.
‘It has a lot of commercial applications in the textile industry, so there is a lot of it legitimately around in India,’ da Re explains. ‘It also came in through Karachi. There’s movement of goods both ways.’
The opium itself arrived in the laboratories as a paste, dried and packed into hessian bags that weighed a ‘maund’ – about thirty-eight kilograms. Da Re says that during his first posting to Pakistan the AFP did want to know about the trafficking routes, but at that time they were more interested in the transactional aspects and connections with Australia.
‘The Americans were playing more of that world policeman role at the time,’ da Re recalls. ‘We didn’t have the funds or resources other than [to say], “Okay, you’ve got a trafficking group in Australia, it’s connected with the money flowing up there or they’re selling gear in the streets.” There was a particular guy in Karachi and I remember during Ramadan he was importing through statues. So he’d go across from Karachi into nearby Baluchistan and conceal it in the statues at the time. This guy ended up dying a violent death in the Philippines, but that’s another story.’
Heroin trading crosses all faiths and all bounds. At that time the police officers were able to get up to places like Peshawar and run informants wh
o would bring back samples from the laboratories that were fed back to the Heroin Signature Program in Australia, which had just started up.
‘So it gave us a fantastic insight as to where these plan labs were, what their capabilities were.’
While Australia did not receive a lot of heroin from the Golden Crescent, there were a significant number of Afghan refugees arriving in Australia, mainly people from the Hazara ethnic group.
‘We probably could have expected to have a bigger problem directly impacting on Australia by virtue of the sheer numbers and the desperate situation the Hazaras found themselves in,’ da Re reflects. ‘It hasn’t borne true, which is really interesting, so the seizures that are coming out of there destined for Australia are not significant. There have been some large ones of a hundred or so kilos through Iran and Afghanistan and some others, but they haven’t been to the numbers that we would expect. So that’s pleasing I think. Plus, we do have some natural advantages with our systems – customs, borders and good reporting systems with finance now; there’s a whole range of counter measures and tools in the toolbox with undercover policing and assumed identities. There’s a whole suite of things that we can do.’
Drug liaison officers from Western countries who were posted in the region would swap information and tips, but the job carried particular dangers. Just after he left his first posting in early 1992, four agents from another country were travelling out of Karachi towards Baluchistan when they were captured. ‘They were kept in a cave for three weeks because they had been out of their area and didn’t have permission to go there. You had to be careful even back in those days. They were lucky to get out of it at all. Imagine nowadays!’
He used to drive around in an old Toyota Corolla, but when he returned in 2010 for his second posting in Pakistan, the situation had become much more dangerous. The agents had to be supported with armoured vehicles and obtain permission to travel anywhere outside of Islamabad.
The Smack Track Page 23